Parcel of Dreams

 

'Parcel of Dreams' Illustrated by Emma Phillips @emmaphillipsart (Instagram)

It’s good to have a dream.

For as long as I remember I have always loved stories, both reading them and writing my own. Of course when you are a child it’s easy to be good at things because parents and friends are keen to praise but when you get older sadly ‘real’ life kicks in!

At school when asked what I would like to be I always answered

‘Oh an author or journalist’ naively believing that life could be that simple. Of course it wasn’t and I ended up doing a job that had absolutely nothing to do with writing and which I hated.

I didn’t give up writing though and one day saw a correspondence course advertised from a writing school which ‘guaranteed results’ It was expensive but I thought it would be worth it if it helped me to write commercially; it didn’t I just wasted a lot of money and ended up being so disillusioned that I gave up – well not entirely I metaphorically wrapped up my dreams in rainbow tissue paper tied up with a silver bow and buried them deep at the back of a drawer.

I got on with being a young adult went out a lot, met lots of people including my future husband and we moved to Cheshunt. There was no time for writing now although I still read lots of books especially on my journey to work, often missing my stop or even bumping into bus stops or lampposts as I was so engrossed in a story!

I still kept a diary though and a book of memories from places we visited. Life went on children came along and my dreams sank lower in the drawer as my world grew busier and my dreams got pushed further down and packed in glittery cotton wool on top of the rainbow paper.

Then one day someone at the school gate said something really nasty and cutting to me and I just could not forget it.

‘How dare they!’

So my little parcel of dreams surfaced from the drawer broke out of their tissue paper and cotton wool and my journey began, I went back to college and started learning again, studying Literature which of course is what I should have done in the first place.

I began writing once more but this time there was no pressure, I wasn’t writing to prove anything, I was writing for me and the love of the written word and the love of stories.

There have been difficult times, studying with a family was never easy but graduating with a degree in Literature made it all worthwhile. I now belong to Book Clubs, Writing Groups and go to anything I can find to do with story because history, her-story and their-story is what as humans we are all about and always will be.